


Domestic

by RurouniHime



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Tag, Established Relationship, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 09:37:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda to Season 12, Episode 10: Genetic Disorder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domestic

**Author's Note:**

> MINOR SPOILERS for S12 E10, Genetic Disorder.

Greg’s been pensive all day. Hard not to be; nothing else to fill his time. Sometimes he wishes his shift were even longer.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting on the edge of the mattress, running his palm over Nick’s side of the bed. He’s already pressed his nose to the pillow, touched a stray hair just on the corner of the case. The imprint of Nick’s head is still there, the mixed scents of his aftershave and cologne lingering in fabric, his reading glasses on the side table, the book he left behind sticking out from under the blanket where Greg tossed it when his alarm woke him this morning. Greg imagines Hodges processing this bed, all the filthy little smirks aimed his way.

Sometimes he hates going into people’s bedrooms on cases. He never sees the differences anymore, only the similarities to his own.

“Watcha doin’?”

Greg turns, and there’s Nick leaning in the doorway. His shirt is unbuttoned enough to see his undershirt, his shoes and socks already shucked, probably by the front door. He’s holding a glass of water and he looks tired, two plane trips and a court statement between this moment and two days ago when he packed up and left. He must have gone to LAX directly from the courthouse: he’s still in his nice ash-grey trousers.

Already the house feels fuller, more alive.

“How long have you been standing there?”

Nick shrugs. “A minute, maybe.”

Greg’s been listening for the front door since he got home, and when it happened, he didn’t even—

“G, you okay?”

Greg gets up. His throat is a little tight, but he can walk, and he crosses around the bed, clipping his thigh on the frame’s corner. Nick watches him come, a steady assessment until Greg takes Nick’s face in both hands and draws himself up, fits his body home along the lines of Nick’s, and kisses his mouth. He means to pull away after the first firm touch, but he can’t do it, and before he knows it, he can feel the water glass pressed up against his shoulder, Nick’s hair short and soft between his fingers, evening stubble grazing his chin and cheek. Greg opens his mouth against Nick’s lips, then turns his head instead and presses his nose into the hollow just beneath Nick’s ear. Inhales. It smells just like the pillow.

“Missed you,” Nick murmurs, and it’s like he plucked the words off of Greg’s tongue.

He thought he must have been imagining it, that the smell of Nick was fading from their linens, but now, confronted with the real thing, he can’t be sure he wasn’t right. Nick’s hands close around his upper arms and push him back, but Greg urges closer, gets his way as well as a sound from Nick that churns his gut, something he hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten. Forgetting it scares him.

“Okay, you’re not alright,” Nick says. This time he succeeds in pushing Greg back. But he retains his grip on Greg’s arms. Looks him in the eye.

Greg tells him about Doc Robbins and sees the troubled light come into Nick’s eyes as he listens and nods until the story is finished. The funny thing is, it’s not the case that has Greg rattled. He’s not even sure ‘rattled’ is the right word. It was asking Catherine, absorbing her words, applying them immediately over and over to his own life, tuning out for a split second when he couldn’t drag his mind away from Nick’s side of the bed, and his side, their sides, their bed, _this_ and—

“How was L.A.?” The words come out fast, on a sigh.

Nick’s mouth curves. Greg couldn’t say what is in his eyes because he’s not looking at them.

“Smoggy. Crowded. Are you…” He gestures at the bed, where Greg was sitting.

Nick’s not a CSI for nothing. Greg thinks it’s arousing, the way Nick zeroes in, the difficulty in prying his attention away from minutiae. The way Nick focuses in on him has always made Greg feel larger than he is, awake, provoked. Measured and then drained of every detail he has to give, and now, now that they’ve done this—

Slept together. Lived together.

—it makes him feel crucial and sought after and singled out and disruptive, like Nick can’t settle his own innards while he’s studying Greg. Nick’s manner of picking him apart these days has to do with touches and thrusts and kisses, teeth and fingernails, tongues, the shivers of muscles, holding Greg still and coaxing his body open and then getting inside and pushing him even farther until Greg can’t help but fall into fragments. There’s nothing else to do, no other way to make _Nick_ fly right apart as well, roll him over and go again, again until the alarm goes off and they have to get up. Again until one or both of them simply has to sleep. Again, until Greg’s nose and mouth and veins are properly filled with Nick, and he can go to work and let Nick watch him without feeling like he needs to go over there and yank his clothing off.

Greg hates washing the sheets, even when Nick’s home. He always leaves it until right before bed. Nick thinks it’s because the sheets stay warm from the dryer, but it’s really to minimize that stretch of time when Greg could conceivably lie down on the bed and not smell Nick there.

Now Nick tracks him with his eyes, brow lined, mouth pinched in that little moue of his. He leans forward and kisses Greg’s cheek right under his left eye.

Nick still _studies_ him. Like he’s excavating layers and layers. Greg wishes he were as sly about it. He’s getting better at not projecting his desire right across the lab. For a while there, he could barely meet Nick’s eyes under the blue lighting of their workplace.

He wants to offer Nick forever. Wants to get down on one knee and propose to him, without a ring, without any of the romance he’s always promised himself he’d draw upon. The emotion is rawer than flowers and candles, physical, messier than well-formed words. It’s primal, pining, melancholy, just _unsatisfied_ in a way that the center of him knows will not be satiated until he really does get Nick in every way he can.

It’s not domestic at all and yet it’s so innately domestic, it’s scary, or had been the first time he felt it.

“Didn’t like walking the lab without you in it,” Greg says, and Nick laughs a little.

“You eat yet?”

“On the way home.”

Nick nods. “Good.” The way he says it sets up a thrum in Greg’s veins. Nick backs Greg across the room, Greg’s side of the bed this time, and nudges him down across it. Greg scoots over to make room, and Nick folds right down into the kiss as if their mouths had never parted, pushes their pelvises together, gets his hand up under the back of Greg’s shirt and his leg between Greg’s, one bare foot curling around his calf.

But Nick pulls up a little. He gazes at Greg for a second, then turns his head and presses his nose down into Greg’s pillow. Shifts over until his face is buried in Greg’s hair, then the arc of his shoulder. His hand spans Greg’s lower back and Greg can feel Nick’s fingers when they tense against his skin. “There,” Nick sighs, and it sounds too relieved, too much that was bottled up suddenly able to get out. A tangible thread of tension slips out of Nick’s body. Greg takes a good, hard look at Nick’s face and sees a few lines he hadn’t noticed before.

“Hotel sheets were way too clean,” Nick murmurs, right against Greg’s mouth.

This time it’s Greg who laughs.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Greg looked particularly concerned and preoccupied during this case, especially in Doc's bedroom, and of course Nick was missing. Naturally, my brain started picking it all apart and putting it back together in Other Ways. I just love how this slash relationship has matured within canon limitations... ^_^


End file.
